Wednesday, 23 September 2009

I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1

That title. A sub-pound price point. How can you resist? I MAED A GAM3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1 is a top-down twin-stick shooter by James Silva, whose priors include The Dishwasher: Dead Samurai for Indie Xbox Live, and Survival Crisis Z for Windows. Players take control of a lonely lethal-man tasked with vanquishing legions of rapid-assault undead. Front end is epilepsy shimmer, block pixel text on pitch backgrounds. Simultaneous four player. You play yourself. This is an experience. In game: skinny zombie grunts are soon joined by lumbering tanks, and enormous word stamps throb and inform the landscape. Dopey grindcore wails along the soundscape, all price alerts and boast chants, the text feedback making a karaoke of the grinding screech theme. Then spotlights appear, and the game shifts psychedelic, introducing abstract enemy types to match the music's tempo shift.

I MAED A GAME3 W1TH ZOMBIES 1N IT!!!1 nicely straddles the twin disciplines of yuk-yuk retro-by-design blasters, and art installation pieces. It jogs quick enough to please maths-minded bullet hell vets, whilstdemonstratingadistinct one-think authoring. Control set-up is instinct accessible, and the title doesn't seek to hide its eccentricities behind mammoth progress. A wonderful introduction to community developed gaming, unfortunately marginalised out-the-box by Microsoft: rather than sell it upfront in the Live boot-up crawl, they'd prefer you to go huntingin sub-sections of sub-sections. The lack of Achievements, yet another bitter slight this title doesn't deserve.